How “Company Hopping” Ruins your ROI

What is “Company Hopping?”

It is jumping from one service company to the next, every few months, for whatever “good reason.”

There are a lot of people who have this operating basis on various services. Call me old school, but I like a relationship with a proven-out service provider and once I find that relationship, I hold onto it for as long as I can. I’ve had the same cell phone provider for 11 years. I know people who change their phone numbers and service providers every year. What’s the result? Everyone I’ve ever known has my phone number and always knows how to get a hold of me. This other person? I never know their number. I always ask who it is texting me and then find out it is them with a new number and new phone provider. The result? I’m creating stability, they are creating erratic and unpredictable communication.

How does this relate to your marketing?

Well, let’s first acknowledge that in the internet space, there are a lot of let’s just say “non-ideal” people providing service that just plain shouldn’t be. But that happens in every business too so, that’s that.

In our space, internet marketing, there are business owners that hop from one company to the next, every 3-6 months, sometimes only after a few weeks. And every time they go from one company to the next, they say the same thing, “Those guys sucked! Hopefully you guys are good!” I actually have my sales dept. trained to filter out and not sell to guys that have gone through 4-5 companies in the last 2 years or so. At some point, you have to ask yourself the question, “Did all 4-5 of those companies suck? Or did the client not persist with any given one of them so none of them could be successful?” Why would I want my industry-leading staff to work with someone like that?

When you’re hiring a new person for your company, it takes 2-3 months for the person to get genned in and learn everything, and that’s not even them hitting their stride! Imagine firing and hiring everyone who took longer than three months to learn their job in full. You’d have no staff! You’d blame a bad HR dept. for this problem, not all of the employees who “didn’t make it.”

And so it goes with your marketing. In our business, there is a runway for take-off, including all of the planning, strategy and execution that goes into a program, the establishment, and not to mention any damage control that must be done from earlier, bad work, which is super-frequent these days. What I just wrote in that sentence above can sometimes take 3-6 months.

I am often asked by potential clients, “How can we be more successful at what we are doing online?” The answer is too simple: Find a company you trust and like to work with, get to know them, create a long term relationship with them and persist through all of the inevitable bumps in the road you two will encounter together. The most successful clients I have are of course, the ones that have been with us the longest.

Any marketing program is like a relay-race. There are multiple legs to the race that must be completed to get the next leg of the race. If a company-hopper only completes the first leg of any race with any one given company, you never win the race and end up with the opinion that “internet marketing doesn’t work.” Tell that one to the business owners that I know that make millions with their online marketing.

Ultimately, company hopping wastes your time, their time, and everyone’s efforts and money. You want a return on your investment right? Company hopping almost never returns your investment. So if you’re sick of spending your marketing budget with no ROI, consider what I am saying. Find a company who you like, one that is competent in what they do, work with them, stick it out. Go through ALL of the legs of the relay race with them. If you do this, you’ll find out what I know, “Hey, these guys don’t actually suck.”

Sincerely,

Dan York

What do our clients say?

When I first started my business in 2007 I heard a bit about SEO and thought it was just another marketing gimmick to get me to buy more services that were not proven to work. So years went by, I pushed my promotion out through postcard marketing, cold-calling, and just hitting the pavement to get new work. Fast forward to 2012 and the climate changed, drastically. The attitude of consumers was evidently shifting over to online search (primarily google). This was making things more accessible for the consumer and quickly became a standard for how people looked for and retrieved information.

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